“Did you get in trouble?” Annamae asked her mother about scribbling on the dollhouse in permanent marker.
“I don’t remember,” her mother said.
“Did she?” Annamae asked Nana.
“Oh honey.” Nana let out a breath that ruffled her lips. “Who knows?”
As if they were talking about other people, other lives.
The lingering presence of her mother’s long-ago self was much more interesting to Annamae than the dolls that had come with the house. This appealingly somewhat naughty specter had more in common with the figures in the beehive office building, those milling silhouettes who kept her company on dark afternoons when she was sick, than with the tiny molded plastic dolls she could make do her bidding, marching them around the rooms of the dollhouse.
Suddenly, on her stomach on Nana’s carpet, Annamae had a realization. It was about the story game. Whenever she played, whenever she whisper-narrated the happenings that unfolded across the street, it was every time the figures did not follow her instructions that counted as winning. The game’s excitement lay in the tension of not knowing whether their actions would match her words or deviate from them. But the game’s pleasure lay in their power to disobey.
It was because these figures were real that she felt a connection.
By real, she meant creatures not of her own making. Beyond her control.